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Joe Truini: There aren’t many repairs a homeowner can make to a central air conditioning system, but here is one. When the compressor gets damaged on the outside the metal fins get crushed like this. It’s important to straighten them out. And here’s one way, with a stiff bristle plastic brush. This one’s made for cleaning tile and grout.

What you need to do is just run the brush up and down the fins using quite a bit of pressure. You’d be surprised you need quite a bit of pressure to straighten these out, even though they’re only aluminum. And this is important because we want air to go completely through these. There we go. That’s better already, after just a few minutes.

It takes three or four minutes to get them all the way straightened out. Now, it’s never going to be perfect, but you can straighten them out so that at least it’s operating pretty efficiently.

Now, if you find any fins that are completely crushed you can very carefully straighten them out with a putty knife. But, again, be careful because you don’t want to damage the fins.